Intel Xeon 3.6 (Nocona) vs. AMD Opteron 250 - Database Test

Order Entry Stress Test Results

Here is where the architectural differences of the Opteron and Nocona are highlighted. The Opteron 250 managed a 7% gain in performance over the 248, impressive scaling for approximately an 8% clock speed increase. The Nocona story doesn't read as well here as the small-medium work load tests, as saturated bus due to the shared FSB implementation of the Xeon is written all over the enterprise test results. If you look at the 3.2 Prestonia results, the 3.6 Nocona only barely managed a 1% gain in performance, which is really within our deviation between runs. The longer pipeline of the Prescott core, combined with a saturated bus, is not helping the Nocona when the going gets tough. Of course, the Nocona is suffering from 1MB less of L2 Cache than the Prestonia Xeon. It's hard to say how much of a difference that makes at this point.

To give you an idea of the scale of this benchmark, we have graphs of stored procedures calls per second. We decided to focus on Stored Procedures/Second rather than Transactions/Second, since the definition of a Transaction can have a business context or a technical context.